Walter Kohn (March 9, 1923-April 19, 2016) was the son of Solomon and Gittel Kohn, Viennese Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust — a fate he escaped by being sent with the Kindertransport to England in 1939. One year later, at age 17, Kohn was transferred to a detention camp for German citizens in Canada. When he entered the University of Toronto, his “German” status precluded him from entering the chemistry building, so instead he studied physics and mathematics — ironic because in the future he would win a Nobel Prize in chemistry.
After serving one year in the Canadian armed forces, Kohn was awarded a war-shortened bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics in 1945 and a master’s degree in the same field the following year. He transferred to Harvard University, where in 1948 he earned a doctorate in physics.
From 1950 through 1960, he was a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, and later was the founding chair of the physics department at UC San Diego, where he also helped to establish the Judaic Studies program. He remained at UCSD until 1979, during which time he and student Chanchal Kumar Majumbar developed a theorem dealing with Fermi gas in its bound and unbound states.
In 1979 he became the founding director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, and in 1984 he became a physics professor at UC Santa Barbara. He and Pierre Hohenberg developed a theorom, which later was further refined in collaboration with Lu Jeu Shamm, that became the work horse of modern materials science. He shared the Nobel Prize in 1998 with Britain’s John Pople, for the development of computational methods in quantum chemistry.
His first marriage to Lois Adams in 1955 ended in divorce. They had three daughters, Marilyn Kohn of San Francisco, Ingrid Pymar of Baltimore, and Rosalind Dimenstein of Los Angeles. He and his second wife, Mara Vishniac, the daughter of the celebrated photographer Roman Vishniac, were married in 1978. His death in 2016 was attributed to cancer of the jaw.
Tomorrow, March 10: Ron Mix
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San Diego Jewish World condensation of articles on Wikipedia and in the Washington Post.